Six Data Breach Lessons from the Trenches

It pays to listen: When an organization employs a collaborative process, it usually has a much better outcome. That means IT professionals should be listening to experts, such as forensic teams, breach resolution providers, privacy attorneys and public relations or crisis communication consultants. After all, these firms walk, talk and breathe data security and data loss every day. According to a recent study from the Ponemon Institute, organizations that hire consultants to help with their data breach response and remediation efforts have lower costs per capita for a data breach.

As the era of Big Data continues to march forward, so does the number of data breaches. Organizations seem to become more vulnerable every day with breaches rising at an alarming rate. In fact, studies, such as "Quantifying the Data Breach Epidemic" from IBM, indicate that companies are attacked an average of 16,856 times per year, and many of those attacks result in a quantifiable data breach.

And with the average breach costing $5.4 million for businesses in the United States, according to the Ponemon Institute, it's important to be prepared. Multiply that by the hundreds, thousands – even millions – of records that are typically compromised in one breach and you begin to realize just how costly a data breach is both on reputation and a company's bottom line.

With this reality facing us, many security experts are convinced that data breaches are inevitable. So if that is the case, what can your organization do to minimize the damage? Based on experience servicing some of the largest breaches to-date, including three of the four largest breaches in 2013, Experian Data Breach Resolution has compiled six important lessons learned from the data breach trenches.

Michael Bruemmer is vice president with the Experian Data Breach Resolution group. A veteran with more than 25 years in the industry, Bruemmer brings a wealth of knowledge related to sales and operations.

To protect the company from those insiders who abuse their privileged access and from hackers with stolen credentials, many companies are turning to a privileged access management (PAM) solution. ... More >>